A Story of Growth: How Buff City Soap is leveraging Shopify and it's people to take a giant leap foward

 You're listening to the Radcast.
 If it's radical, we'd cover it.
 Here's your host, Ryan Alford.
 Hey guys, what's up?
 It's Ryan Alford.
 Welcome to the latest episode of the Radcast.
 We're in the middle of our e-commerce series.
 It's been going really well.
 We've had some fascinating guests.
 And we've got a fast growing company that I'm excited to be talking
 to Sanjay Jenkins, who's the director of e-commerce with Buff City.
 So, Sanjay, great to have you on the Radcast.
 Thank you so much for having me.
 It's an honor.
 Great.
 Well, hey man, you're the director of e-commerce.
 We talked a little bit pre-episode of the growing role that you have.
 We'll talk about that as we get into the episode.
 But maybe let's just go right at it.
 Let's talk about Sanjay.
 Let's talk about your background.
 And then we'll dig into specifics on Buff City.
 But maybe just start there, man.
 Yeah.
 I'll give you the...
 I grew up in Missouri.
 I'm a Missouri boy.
 A small town.
 Big nerd.
 Let's just love learning about stuff.
 I got into e-commerce about seven years ago.
 And I started a bark box clone.
 So it was like right when the subscription box boom started to happen.
 Some bark box was taken off that I do the same.
 Just started the...
 It was a class project in college,
 like my senior year project.
 And we made five figures a month doing it from a revenue perspective.
 But that was like my first lesson in profitability.
 And just the complexity of operations.
 Because we made no money from a profit standpoint.
 For every box that we said to a customer,
 we sent one to an animal shelter.
 Trying to do the Tom's one-to-one there.
 But there was so many...
 We just did not plan out the costs associated with shipping.
 And actually letting the customer choose where to send it to
 versus us making those donations in bulk.
 So we ended up graduating college.
 We rolled that...
 Like actually handed that off as a project for students in the
 entrepreneurship program at the University of Arkansas at one.
 I swear on to college.
 And I just worked in e-commerce in a variety of places.
 I worked at an architecture and engineering consulting firm.
 It's a very specific thing.
 And they sold digital products.
 So they had information books about what the salaries were supposed to be
 for your architects and your project managers who were
 civil engineering background project managers.
 There's a very interesting, very niche there.
 From there, I work...
 So the thing that I learned there,
 one of the cool things about how my career has progressed
 thus far is that at each job,
 there was one skill that I really got to go deep on.
 At that company was email marketing.
 So I was not familiar with the email marketing at all at that point.
 I grew up in the age of social media being like the number one thing.
 And that was always the focus, especially particularly on the organic side.
 So I was like, okay, email marketing to people actually opened this and just seeing the power of it.
 So, you know, learning how I became a power user of Clavio in like two weeks.
 And, you know, we ran about seven figures to the pipe just on email at that business.
 From there, I worked at a e-commerce platform startup,
 which is an interesting experience.
 It's basically a competitor to Shopify Plus, really enterprise-level software.
 And the thesis that that business was, you know,
 Shopify's got this entire ecosystem of apps and all these features.
 Like what happens if we consolidate everything and then build like a true enterprise software in that space.
 So I was the seventh employee.
 I was the first sales hire.
 I was an SDR there. I started as an SDR.
 As I went along, I mean, I learned two major skills at that business.
 The first was selling.
 Like I became like a proficient seller from SDR to close.
 And then the number two thing that actually became kind of like the cornerstone of my career
 since that moment was media buying.
 So I really went deep on media buying.
 And as that kind of company progressed and I kind of realized like,
 you know, it's probably not going to work out for me here long term.
 I am we actually launched an email marketing tool basically like a Mailchimp light,
 which Mailchimp is by itself a pretty lightweight product.
 So it's something even less robust, very simple product.
 But we got like we went from zero to about $100,000 in ARR in like a week,
 like about a week and a half through media buying.
 I literally recorded the ads in front of the camera.
 I edited the videos, bought the ads myself like full end end,
 built the landing page the whole thing.
 So that was a really cool experience.
 I realized that, you know, I can make a little bit of a career out of media buying
 and just doing agency work now that have the email marketing skills.
 A buddy who worked at the company, that startup we left and we started our agency.
 We ran the agency for a little bit, just working with e-commerce folks.
 So that was that's our bread and butter.
 What was interesting about that little experience was we were in North to Arkansas.
 So that's predominantly Walmart, JB Hunt and Tyson.
 And really, if you're an agency world, the money is servicing,
 money is in servicing Walmart.
 We didn't do any of that.
 We worked with companies that didn't sell into Walmart.com or didn't sell into Walmart at all.
 So we're always kind of like the odd men out and I was trying to figure out like,
 what's the next path?
 Is it, do I go start like the bag was very clearly in servicing these Walmart clients,
 you know, six, seven, eight figure contracts.
 No one really understood direct consumer the way, you know, we did at the time in North to Arkansas.
 And so I was trying to figure out what to do.
 And then someone that I met a couple years prior, his name is Justin Lanny, CEO of Buff City.
 He hit me up on Instagram.
 He DM me, he was like, hey man, like got something I want to talk to you about.
 I met Justin two years ago or, yeah, it's two years ago now at a pitch competition at the University of Arkansas.
 It's like one of the like 60 second business idea pitches.
 I won the contest.
 He was one of the judges.
 We talked about shoes for 30 minutes.
 He was wearing easy.
 He's got one of the greatest easy collections I've ever seen.
 I think he has like literally every pair.
 And we talked about that and we kept in touch for two years over Instagram DMs about shoes.
 And we have like a great love of cars.
 And like, particularly Portia's and Lamborghini.
 So that's what we talked about for two years.
 And then he's kind of out of the blue.
 I didn't realize that he was actually following what I was doing in my career and hit me up about the job of running e-commerce for Buff City.
 Which I started back in January.
 What that looked like was.
 We platforming off of WooCommerce, putting us on Shopify, building out the tech stack.
 And just starting to scale this business from, you know, just like the really basic direct to consumer stuff.
 Getting our Facebook and Google ads running correctly.
 You know, just like the really, really.
 It's honestly like simple at this point.
 Maybe it's when you do it, I guess it's pretty complicated.
 And then in addition to that, I've been doing support for digital marketing for the entire Buff City system.
 So we are just to kind of give some context on Buff City.
 We are a primarily physical retail soap company.
 Everything that you see in a store is really made in the store that you're seeing it in.
 And our physical retail footprint growth happens through franchising.
 So we're a franchise business. It's a really interesting model.
 I run e-commerce, which is kind of owned from the central franchise or entity.
 And have to work really closely with franchisees.
 There's a lot of a lot of intricate stuff there in terms of one.
 Just trying to build an omnichannel experience for the customer, making it seamless, but two on the back end.
 You know, franchisees don't feel like this is corporate competition, but actually like building a system long term that will actually give them credit.
 Or I mean, the goal of the dream is that we can build a system where we can credit them for e-commerce sales that occur in their territories or customers that are in their database.
 So we're trying to figure out how to execute that at scale.
 And recently, as I was telling you that pre-show, I literally last week I took over the production facility that we have.
 So it's basically one big soap makeery.
 We're running very similar processes that we do in the stores to make all of our products.
 Our products are handmade daily.
 And I get to like, there was like, I did the six sigma internship a couple years ago, at a single company.
 And I was like, on like, I went from fiberglass to the asphalt lines to like, but finished, single line, like diagram all these things.
 I get to like deploy that kind of thinking that experience into a facility that I controlled.
 The cool thing there is, you know, from the moment a raw material, you know, the soap blend is made.
 It's poured into a mold gets cut to getting a customer to buy it online, you know, and then shipping to my control that entire experience now.
 And having these controls, understanding the process just makes scale a lot easier to achieve along the run.
 So that's the abridged version of my career.
 A lot to unpack there, a lot of keywords, you know, your clavio experience work, clavio partner agency or shop five partner agency.
 I have to like, I don't know, my mind just goes here, I can go by like 10 things noted here, but I'm going to go here.
 So when you first come into Buff City, was it already decided or did you make the decision to transfer from, you know, WooCommerce, which runs on WordPress?
 Right. Is there eCommerce engine?
 It's considered a legitimate eCommerce platform, even.
 I'm going to lead you to an answer that I hope it is because as a shop five agency that does both I, but I'll show my hand a bit.
 I am curious, was that your decision when the decision already made and you came in to help steer that or, you know, what was the decision you're moving from?
 What is a relatively robust eCommerce platform?
 Sure, commerce is not a lightweight. It's not like some clients that come to us around square space eCommerce.
 Yeah. Yeah.
 I can understand that transition walk me through whose decision that was and why the decision was made.
 So that was something that Justin CEO had kind of already decided upon.
 Yeah.
 And I was just kind of like the verification step.
 Yeah.
 I was like, yeah, if we're going to, if I'm going to run it, like I want to run on Shopify.
 All of the sites that I've been able to scale, we built on Shopify, which is not to say that there aren't other eCommerce platforms.
 I think we'll evolve. We'll probably have a more custom solution as we grow.
 Yeah.
 The nature of the business that we're in, but for right now, Shopify is the platform, like,
 think about WooCommerce that scares me the most is that like when you have a product or you add a product to a cart,
 it creates this like phantom blog post.
 And that's how like WooCommerce on the back end actually like tracks these things and just think about like the technical complexity of that system.
 You're trying to turn a blog tool into a shopping cart, I guess, scary as hell.
 Yeah. So we, yeah, I was, I was so eager to get off of WooCommerce.
 It was a decision that had been made.
 And I'm glad that it wasn't hard to put the final stamp on that.
 We've had a lot of clients come to us that, you know, have been on big commerce and other platforms that are seemingly.
 But nothing skills like Shopify does.
 I don't want to say to be a Shopify commercial, but I'm in agreement.
 We play video as well and some of the integrations and just they've kind of figured it out.
 And now Shopify plus is the more commercial grade, you know, as you grow.
 That's an opportunity or whether you, you know, custom code your own, you know, site, you know,
 third point. So you, so you own the full experience and hopefully you're running from shop.
 Right. You know, right. For sure.
 Own land versus rented land.
 Another discussion we had in the marketing space.
 But talk about the, you know, what that transition's done and kind of just overall growth that you guys are happening.
 Maybe just give us some, some, the landscape of where above cities at.
 So I'll say I'll, I'll be delicate about this in the way of phrases.
 We have, so we haven't hit Q4 yet.
 This is September 23rd, I think.
 In 29, since we have 10 x the top line of 2019 so far this year before hitting holiday.
 And we are very much one of the retailers where like, you know,
 80 to 60% of our revenue may be more depending on how hard we can scale in the next few months.
 We'll come from Q4. So Shopify has been a tremendous tool.
 If we were still on WooCommerce, so like when COVID lockdown started happening across the country,
 a lot of our stores had to shut down.
 So we essentially brought like all of that store volume was processed through our store.
 If we were still running on WooCommerce, it would have, like we would have had like a disaster.
 We had on April 1st, which was hilarious because it's like April Fool's Day.
 We had our biggest day yet.
 Like single day was 3x, what we did on Cyber Monday 2019, which is just insane.
 Just just a really great preview of what's to come later this year.
 But if we were on WooCommerce, like we would not have been able to support that.
 Even on just like very simple things like customer service.
 So I run the customer service team.
 We are set up on gorgeous. That's our customer service tool.
 The fact that our customer service team can, you know, if that we need to reship in order for some reason or like they were missing a bar of stuff.
 But we can take care of things really quickly.
 That is just one of the great parts of Shopify is that it's so well integrated with so many things.
 It's so easy to use and it's so easy to train people on.
 If we probably went when we moved to a custom solution, I'm trying to mimic as much as we can from like the Shopify experience.
 Just because from the back end user perspective, it's, it's pretty dialed in, in my opinion.
 What's been the path to growth from a marketing perspective for both city?
 Maybe from a tactical standpoint, whether it's social media, it's I'm sure it's a big role.
 But maybe what are some of those, you know, tactical paths that have did have seen and driven the growth for you guys?
 Sure.
 So we launched our first ad, like true, like Facebook marketing advertising on March 16th, I think.
 That's been a huge lever for us this year as we've scaled.
 So like top line customer acquisition stuff, Facebook advertising has been like the cornerstone of that.
 Within that, we're really big on, on text message marketing.
 And we use a tool called Voxie, they're based out of Atlanta.
 It's two way communication.
 So we can do blast, we can do behavior based triggered text, like a banding cart, for example.
 But we can also like customers can text us back.
 And my customer service team is plugged in to have two way communication.
 So if the customer texts in, like a rule send a blast on a, like a weekend sale day and say, hey, like we're doing a laundry sale, you know, stock up on your laundry.
 So don't forget to add a dryer ball.
 And customers say like, hey, what's a dryer ball?
 Or like what kind of sense do the drier balls come in like customer service team comes in and says, X, Y and Z.
 So that list has been, especially from like a conversion standpoint, it converts a lot higher at a higher rate than our email marketing list.
 But for both email marketing and the text message marketing, we've been doing pretty aggressive push, just like lead generation stuff, just to grow those lists.
 Once we have them, obviously it's a lot cheaper than trying to pay the face of the Zuck tax to acquire them again.
 So, you know, Facebook advertising, flowing into just like true direct response, and then also lead generation to build our email and text message.
 Listen, we're, you know, we're very intentional about that.
 We've 20 X start email list since I took over.
 Yeah, that's great.
 Got to have you got to own the customer relationship and that starts with email for primarily is any other channel.
 So you've got the stores, you got to ecom.
 Are you guys Amazon?
 Well, I mean, any other distribution is 1% D to see.
 It's D to see and really the reason.
 So I'll put a little asterisk on that.
 The core buff city business.
 You know, from a customer perspective is like, you know, this is a place where I get soap.
 But for us, when we look at it as stewards of the brands, of the brand as executives of the company, like,
 our first customer is our franchisees.
 So, buff city's value is really derived by, you know, a number of stores we have.
 And so that's always the primary focus.
 Like, I have to like always say, the stores are more important than what I do online on ecommerce.
 And it's a very interesting like, you know, I've been a DTC guy since, you know, since I started in ecommerce.
 So like having the knowledge that what I do supports a larger mission.
 That's like nothing related to ecommerce, really.
 Has been has been an interesting shift in thinking, but.
 Like that's like the baseline is growing the franchise business is the most important thing.
 I'm sorry.
 What else?
 I would just deeper part of the question holds like, you know, the channels, right?
 franchise e-based, obviously, which is excellent.
 And I want to go down that path of the ecom franchise e-share model.
 Like I want to hit that, but didn't know if there were plans in the works for other distribution points.
 Right. So the reason why we don't do Amazon, we don't do wholesale is because we're trying to grow the franchise footprint, like the store footprint.
 That is like our true, like, mechanic of growth and scaling distribution.
 I mean, that every time we open a store, like, that's just more fuel for the ecom as well.
 It's just by nature of like franchise e spending money to grow marketing and people becoming more of the brand.
 Us spending marketing on behalf of our marketing dollars on behalf of the franchisees.
 To grow awareness in new markets, things of that nature, we got a vending machine that we're testing out.
 The most crazy stuff that we do.
 The stores are the primary growth channel, which I think is.
 I think it's, it's a very to what to everything else that's going on in a COVID world.
 If we just want to call it what it is, obviously, you guys are generating success from it.
 We're going to talk about some of that growth, but you know, you're at 40 plus stores.
 You've had a COVID world still in a little bit of a COVID world where everything's moving online.
 You guys are growing online, but you got to see the growth through the stores and through that experience.
 So that's that's unique to you guys for sure.
 I mean, what I like we're so lucky to be selling soap, like making and selling soap in a time in the world needs it.
 And then for us, we feel this great sense of duty for people to provide people with, you know, something that they need, but in a really delightful way.
 So our fragrances, our product forms, like the way you use them, like all of these things are designed to be delightful and pleasant and like spark joy in your life.
 Which is the sort of it's a really great thing to like come in and every day and like, no, like we're trying to make the world a little bit better place from our supply chain.
 Like all the good stuff that we're trying to do there, making sure we're not, you know, supporting any like man made my commands, like where the kids working like we cut that kind of make sure we avoid all of that.
 We don't support those kinds of entities and all the way to like the end customer experience where they receive it and they can like, you know, smell a bar, whether it's in store or on and they receive a shipment.
 It's it's pretty, I feel like it's almost like a noble cause in that way of what we're doing.
 We're really lucky to be in this game right now. Like we, like there's so many things.
 It's a very jarring thing to say, I think, because like obviously the luck has not been evenly distributed across the ecosystem.
 Right. So we're trying to like grow as much as we can.
 It's gratifying to be able to provide people jobs in a time when it's really hard to get a job.
 Yeah. So that's the kind of stuff that we're really working for.
 Like for us, it's like we want to be stewards of growth to be able to like provide opportunity and time is really hard to access opportunity.
 That's great. So you're at 40 plus stores this year and growing and some significant growth plans for next year.
 You talk about that and they'll end back to that e-commerce share, which is pretty unique.
 You know, how you guys are envisioning, you know, a lot of times the stores are in see themselves as in competition with their corporate e-commerce site, right?
 You can buy online, then I sell less in store.
 But you guys are approaching it a little differently with your growth. Can you talk about that a little bit?
 Yeah. So I mean, again, primary growth metric is store number of stores that are open.
 Our goal is to have a thousand stores open in the United States alone by 2025.
 And that's just like so we're doing.
 We will be.
 We are a third of the way there or so like about that's the estimation right now.
 By the end of next year.
 So, you know, aggressive solid two years in and like we made some amazing progress and.
 It's just like, it just depends on how quickly, you know, we can get real estate approved and.
 Get stores set up.
 100% franchise.
 It's not 100%. It's mostly I think probably like at scale, it'll be like 95.
 I think I don't remember the exact number, but it'll be primarily for some company owned.
 And so I'm merely franchise.
 Right. So our corporate stores right now, we've got some in Memphis, which is where the company is founded.
 We're opening two here in Dallas and store new headquarters in the next couple of months.
 And we're really exciting, some amazing flagship stores.
 And then our Denver market is also corporate right now.
 But everything else right now that we have is franchise on.
 And so, but the e-commerce site is being tailored to where.
 Franchise ease will share in revenue that there, you know, say you, you come on to the site.
 And I, you know, we're in Greenville, South Carolina.
 So let's say you have, we have a store that opens in Greenville, hopefully soon.
 The, I think it's like Q, Q one or Q two of next year.
 It's coming.
 So both city opens on, on my phone, I'm store locator.
 And I'm here and I purchase, there's going to be some attribution back to the store that e-commerce share.
 So that's the goal.
 We.
 That's one of those like five year infrastructure projects that we had.
 It actually seems like a long term play.
 That's a great difficult play, you know, on the, we don't have to get too geeky on the technology side of that.
 But that's, that's pretty high development.
 Stuff there.
 Our CTO, his name is Brandon Powers.
 He is like a wizard, like a technology wizard.
 I wish I could have a tenth of his like brain power.
 So that was like when he's, when he came on earlier this year or at the beginning of the year,
 he was five year vision was like to be able to build that model.
 We piloted it or pile, yeah, we tested it throughout COVID.
 So when the stores shut down or like, you know, it was kind of variable.
 We started doing rebate.
 So basically using the store customer database to cut like, you know, checks to stores.
 Okay, this is like the customer was acquired at your store.
 This online, you can't be open legally.
 So like here's, you know, here's the money.
 Yeah.
 That allowed like some stores were able to continue to grow through it.
 I guess if they were able to do curbside.
 Other stores, they were from those checks, at least able to pay rent, which is so critical.
 Like the fact that, you know, we were able to help these businesses stay upright and going in the right direction.
 When it was like very, very difficult to retail, they exist at all.
 Long term, so we're calling this program ship from store, which is, which rolls in both the attribution model.
 And, you know, as the name suggests, like the ability to ship from the store.
 So all of the products that we have can and are made in the stores.
 So we can turn those into like many production and distribution centers.
 So in, you know, the future state that we're working to, we've built, you know, some way to attribute cleanly and reliably the sale to the store as when it gets processed online.
 And then, you know, we don't, we haven't worked at any of the details on like what the percentages are and like how that's calculated yet.
 So in addition to that, like the same way that when you order like a pizza from Pizza Hut, your closest franchise, pizza Hut is the one delivering it like they're the ones making it and shipping it to you.
 Or if they have like a delivery vehicle, for example, they'll deliver it to you.
 So it's, that's the future state we're working on.
 That's probably when we leave like the Shopify ecosystem, go build a custom e-com setup that's really deeply tied to our store point of sale system, which is unified across the system.
 And that's like the core. And then from there, it's like layering on like loyalty, like unified CRM, we can track lifetime value in store and online versus just like those two entities separately.
 That's where the stuff gets really crazy and really fun.
 What are, um, is there anything else on the marketing side that's been successful for you guys?
 And influencers, if you go in that path, direct mail, direct mail.
 Hey, I love it. We work with, we actually just still do a lot of direct mail too.
 It's so funny. People have like given up on it. It's like still works.
 So yeah, if you do it right and for us, like we have, we've done it both for the stores and online.
 And we basically just like have a, like a kickback, like you're 20% off or $5 up laundry or a free bar of soap, that sort of thing.
 That's been really effective for us. And I think through the postal service, it's like 17 cents to send a postcard.
 Like it's super cheap. So that's really effective.
 Influencers been good. We haven't used that as aggressively as I would have liked from like a sales growth.
 For example, we're doing a lot of work on the, um, basically influencers doing parties with their followers in the stores, getting people in the stores.
 Again, that's like the primary thing that we want to support and grows like all the stores that we have.
 Um, we've got some influencers like I think the best channel that we've had influencer, like effectiveness on and any sort of return has been ticked.
 We'll give influencers like a discount code for them to share with their followers who send them a care package.
 Um, and you know, I'll post about it. Here's, here's my code. Um, we got some like, it's, it's, you know, 80, 20 rule to the max.
 So we've got a ton of people who like, you know, one Z2 Z sales here and there.
 And then we've got a few there, just like massive like returns.
 And they're, they've got like 4,000 followers. It's not, it's not a crazy follower account. It's just that for us, like the local communities.
 Um, like our model for, for the stores works well in 10,000, like pop pop populations of 10,000 people and, you know, much more than that.
 Um, we can support such a, like a wide range of folks.
 Um, so it's just cool to see like those micro influencers.
 Oh, yeah. I guess they're called words at the micro and really crank. Yeah.
 We see it with campaigns. We run like a couple thousand, 3000 followers and they get the best results.
 You just need a bunch of them. They're cheaper. So you can spread it out.
 Um, talk about who's your customer? Who's, who is the, I mean, I know there's probably different, but who is the buff city customer? Like what's your profile?
 So, um, so I'll use that kind of some of the terminology that we have in our brand guidelines.
 Um, she is, you know, someone who is sent obsessed.
 Um, and what's something that is good for her skin, like just like conscious of that, like skin conscious, I think is the terminology there.
 Um, the sent obsessed part is the really critical thing. We are a scent first brand.
 Um, our fragrances are amazing. Like we've got such a wide range of them too, and we can customize a lot of things.
 Um, so it's really.
 Just people who care about the, like the plant based, like the natural ingredients that we use in our soaps and skin care products.
 They're really like, they're, they're primarily motivated by, by fragrance.
 So, you know, these are the, we kind of overlap a lot of customers with lush and bath and bodywork. I think those are probably like the two best competitive proxies that we have.
 So yeah, it's just like, from an age range, like it's, it's so weird.
 From a client services perspective, aided talking to, and said, oh, everyone's our customer.
 Um, like we don't have like one specific customer profile. We can splice and dice our customers in a variety of ways we do.
 Um, but there is a lot of evenness in the size of our customer demographics.
 Um, apart from like gender is probably like the most polarized one. It's, I think it's 75, 25 female, the male.
 Um, but our age range is, you know, little kids all the way to 65 plus.
 We can, we can, we can hit that 13 plus on, on Snapchat. Then we run Snapchat ads and like still see a good return.
 Hey, everybody needs some soap and the smell good. Yeah. Yeah.
 It's a very universal thing. Absolutely. Yeah. Exactly.
 I love it. So where's product development? Like, that seems like that would be a huge one.
 Um, you know, product, you know, maybe we'll tie it up with that. Like product development and where you, where, where things.
 We've talked about it overall, but, you know, I dare say, I don't like to say in the game, but we're, you know, where are we headed with all this overall for both you and the brand.
 And then, you know, maybe touch on product development a little. Sure.
 Um, so I'll do product development and I'll do like the long, the endgame kind of stuff.
 Um, so our CMO, his name's Chad Brisen Dean, who, um, I love that guy. I really do.
 In his off time, he runs bourbon companies. He just, he just had his like first bottle launch for his new bourbon company this week.
 And he, uh, he and our first soap makers are founders of the company Brad Kellerman and Jen.
 Um, they work together really well in coming up with new products, new product categories that can still be manufactured within the store.
 So that's like the context that we always like to take things back to.
 Um, but like really like the, the goal is like, how do we kind of PNG it and, you know, kind of own everything in, in your, your bathroom and then, you know, your skincare routine and then obviously like our bar, one of our best products ever is our laundry soap, which is a replacement to laundry detergent.
 It's a powder.
 Um, and then it's, yeah, it's literally the best stuff. I'll, I'll make sure to get you all some.
 But, you know, it's like going more into the home care stuff, like that's the kind of thinking that we're doing now and the plans that we put in action.
 Again, like trying to contextualize that as much as possible to kind of be made in the store.
 I'm sure at some point we'll have to deviate from that. Maybe, um, but like primarily it's like, let's try to do everything we can to store it to just own bathroom laundry and just like home care, like bathroom and home care.
 Yeah.
 Um, for, for the company in general, like, like 1000 stores, 2025, um, in the United States, but like long term goal, Toledo to Tokyo, like we're going to be everywhere globally.
 Um, we try, we're very aggressive about, um, are very intentional, not aggressive, but intentional about trying to break into, um, Asia and Europe.
 I'm really keen on trying to break into Africa. I just, I just, something about that continent that fascinates me. Um, and I think that because of like how universally applicable our brand is, there'd be a lot of cool stuff we could do there is something that was just kind of like a passionate mind.
 Um, and then for me personally, like, I'm trying to ride the soap game as high as I can go.
 And, um, you know, maybe buy some apartment complexes and self store units all along the way, but apart from that, just just keep cranking in the soap game, build a really beautiful on the channel experience.
 I mean, that's like the buzzword of the century right there on the channel.
 Um, but like I truly believe like giving customers the ability to, you know, buy their stuff from anywhere, whether it's in store online.
 And then on the back end, empowering our store operators, whether they're corporate stores or franchise store operators.
 Um, like from a digital marketing perspective, like having access to the LTV data to make really great decisions, having access to the, you know, the, um, real time, you know, cross selling upselling,
 uh, decision, um, systems, uh, to just increase their revenues because like ultimately we are like the brand is supported by our stores.
 They always come first and, um, everything that I do, everything we all do is to support the source.
 I love it, man. I, uh, I wrote down selling suds with your buds.
 There you go. There it is.
 I love it, man. So working, uh, working people keep up with all things buff city and all things sun J was what's what are our best destinations.
 So, uh, for buff city buff city soap dot com, um, please, uh, get you some soap, as it were, um, and social media app up city soap.
 Buff city soap near you, they'll have their own local Instagram and Facebook pages.
 Um, you can follow our corporate buff city soap on Twitter. And then if you want to hit me up, um, I'm pretty active on, on Twitter at sun J at play is my, my Twitter handle, um, DM me.
 Uh, just, uh, message any time happy to have a conversation with anybody.
 Sweet man. Sun J, it's been a pleasure. Let's do it again, man. Let's, let's follow up.
 Blue follow up maybe beginning of the year. I want to see where this all is.
 Yeah, and, uh, you know, it's, it seems like like you said, I mean, you're fortunate.
 I believe people create their own fortunate, you know, we're in a time where there's hyper sensitivity to cleanliness and those kind of things, which is helping.
 But it sounds like you guys are also kind of creating and, and generating your own path.
 So grass all you guys and really appreciate you coming on the rap test.
 Thank you so much for having, uh, having me and then giving us an opportunity to share or building.
 All right, guys. Thanks so much, man. We'll talk soon.
 Hey guys, really enjoyed this sit down with Sanjay Jenkins, the director of e-commerce with buff city soaps.
 We covered the gamut of e-commerce on this episode.
 Everything from transitioning from WooCommerce to Shopify and the opportunity to build Shopify Plus or bigger platforms.
 We talked about Sanjay's growth in his position and the extreme growth of buff city soaps.
 Really fascinating franchise model they have building and just a lot of exciting content.
 Check out more with buff city soaps and always learn more about the radcast at the radcast.com or on Instagram at the.rad.cast.
 Look forward to seeing you next time to listen to full episodes or to contact us.
 Visit us on the web at the radcast.com or follow our host, Ad Ryan offered on Instagram.
 Thanks for tuning in.
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